U.S. State Code Annotations Not Protected by Copyright

In Georgia v. Public.Resource.org, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that the state of Georgia does not own the copyright to annotations in its state law codes. Intellectual Property Magazine contacted Finnegan partner Brett Heavner for his thoughts on how the decision will impact legal publishers.

Brett said, “If no one owns copyright in the code annotations/commentaries, legal publishers will have difficulty generating income from the commentaries. While in theory the private legal publishers could preserve the copyright in the code annotations/commentaries by authoring them independently (and thereby stay within the protection of Callaghan v Myers), authorship and distribution could be cumbersome without the cooperation of state legislatures.”

Read the full article here.